## A strongly competitive randomized paging algorithm.(English)Zbl 0731.68040

Summary: The paging problem is that of deciding which pages to keep in a memory of k pages in order to minimize the number of page faults. We develop the partitioning algorithm, a randomized on-line algorithm for the paging problem. We prove that its expected cost on any sequence of requests is within a factor of $$H_ k$$ of optimum. $$(H_ k$$ is the k-th harmonic number, which is about ln(k).) No on-line algorithm can perform better by this measure. Our result improves by a factor of two the best previous algorithm.

### MSC:

 68W10 Parallel algorithms in computer science 68N25 Theory of operating systems
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### References:

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